We support the development of community care through investment in organisations and projects across the UK

About us

The Care and Wellbeing Fund was launched in 2015 with £12 million of investment from Big Society Capital and Macmillan Cancer Support.

The Fund was established to develop and scale community-based services to improve health and wellbeing across the country, particularly for those suffering from long term conditions such as cancer. This is a new means of investing in and scaling community care, and aims to create services that allow people dealing with long term health conditions to access the services they need, when and where they need them. The Fund has four key priorities:

Community based care

Integrated care

Better use of informal resources

Prevention and wellbeing

The Fund is managed by Social Finance, a non-profit with a strong track record of delivering innovative programmes in the health and social care space.

Partners

The fund is managed by Social Finance, a leading not for profit, social investment intermediary with a strong track record in the health and social care sector. The team has a wide range of backgrounds which include NHS senior management and central government policy experience. Over the last few years Social Finance has worked on a wide number of health and social care related projects, including designing and raising capital for new services, advising both commissioners and social enterprises, and helping to manage and evaluate the delivery of innovations.

Big Society Capital is a financial institution with a social mission, set up to build the social investment market in the UK, so that charities and social enterprises can access appropriate repayable finance to enable them to grow, become more sustainable and increase their impact on society. They have invested £6 million in the fund alongside Macmillan.

Macmillan Cancer Support aims to reach and improve the lives of everyone living with cancer in the UK. The Charity has invested £6 million into the Fund, with the aim of creating and delivering new and sustainable services in the community.

The Health Foundation, an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK, is a Development Partner - providing development funding to build the pipeline of investment opportunities.

Programmes of work

End of life care

Currently, 350,000 people with palliative care needs die each year in England, equivalent to c.1% of the population.

Each patient at the end of life should be supported to die well and in their place of choice, but currently there are challenges in delivering care that is well planned and tailored to patient’s needs. Evidence suggests that community services can deliver better experiences for people at the end of life and prevent costly, avoidable hospital care. Evidence suggests that community-based services can deliver improved care for people at the End of Life and prevent costly, avoidable hospital care.

We are therefore looking to work with a cohort of CCGs to establish a social investment model to drive improvements in End of Life Care, delivering wider savings for commissioners.

The need for health and care services in the community is expected to increase significantly over the next 10 years. The number of over 65s will rise from approximately 10 million people in 2010 to 16 million people in 2030, with over half of people over 70 living with long term health conditions. There will be 4 million people living with cancer.

Therefore we are interested in talking to primary care providers that are structured as social enterprises and require additional investment to increase the scale of the community-based services they provide.

The Care & Wellbeing Fund is looking to offer such providers a combination of both financial investment and business advisory support.

The Fund will tailor the structure of its investments to fit the needs of each organisation, and can consider both equity and debt (secured or unsecured) in amounts from £400,000 to over £1 million.

We are also open to discussing potential investments focused on different areas of health and social care, for example:

Improved domiciliary care models.

Programmes that support social prescribing.

Housing Associations that offer step-down care facilities to help people move out of acute care safely, and in a way that leaves them in control of their own care.

Programme or providers that offer vocational rehabilitation.

Information for Social Enterprises

We are committed to supporting social enterprises that are innovating within the community care space, in order to help them deliver their work. We are actively looking for impactful, scalable operations run by outstanding social enterprises, with a focus on improving health and wellbeing in the community, particularly those supporting people suffering from long-term conditions such as cancer. If you think you could be relevant for investment, please read more about our funding priorities in the downloadable document below.

Information for commissioners

We are looking for commissioners and other local health and care system leaders who are interested in exploring the potential for social investment to support community-based interventions. The majority of the Fund’s investments will be made into service redesign projects to drive improvements in care while delivering savings for commissioners. By working in partnership, commissioners will have access to upfront capital for developing new or adapted services, alongside sector-specific expertise in the design and implementation of new interventions, data analysis and business support.

Our Investments

The first investment of the Care & Wellbeing Fund (£350,000) is into a new programme tackling loneliness and isolation in Worcestershire. Loneliness is a key determinant of health and wellbeing amongst the older population and is an issue that affects more than one in five people living with cancer in the UK. The intervention will be offered to 3,000 people and will be delivered by Age UK Herefordshire and Worcestershire, together with local voluntary and community organisations.

Our team

Clodagh Warde - Fund Director

Clodagh joined Social Finance in February 2015. She is responsible for the Care & Wellbeing Fund, working with commissioners and social enterprises to develop innovative, outcomes based services. Before joining Social Finance Clodagh worked in health, both in advisory and leadership roles in the UK and abroad. Most recently she was a Senior Adviser in NHS England, prior to which she was Managing Director of an NHS CSU (Commissioning Support Unit). She was also Deputy and Interim CEO of a large Community NHS trust (4,500 staff) where she gained valuable insights into the realities of care provision, patient experience, and system integration. Clodagh also spent three years working with a HIV/AIDS community care program in Uganda that became the first NGO to dispense ARVs (anti-retrovirals) and was recommended by President’s Bush PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) fund as a model of best practice.

Clodagh started her career as a systems engineer before developing a career in banking, as an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. She received her MBA from Saïd Business School, Oxford University, and holds both a degree in Information Technology and an ACCA (accounting) diploma.

David Fletcher - Senior Fund Adviser

David is non-executive Chairman of Odey Asset Management, a UK fund manager which manages $12billion in a variety of conventional and alternative strategies. He has been Chairman and Chief Executive of Odey for the last 20 years, before which he worked at Leopold Joseph, the UK quoted merchant bank, where he was CEO.

Rosanna Hardwick - Fund Manager

Rosanna joined the Fund team in December 2015 from Student Minds, the UK’s student mental health charity, where she coordinated the charity’s day-to-day operations, supporting 400 volunteers at over 30 universities and managing the charity’s finances and fundraising. Prior to this she worked at Deloitte as an audit associate. She has a first class degree and Masters in Physics from the University of Oxford.

Luisa Braig - Fund Analyst

Luisa joined Social Finance in October 2016. Prior to this she worked for a social enterprise in the international development sector. She graduated from the University of Cambridge with a MPhil in Development Studies.